At European Union level, tax authorities are the first to react and implement digitized tax reporting processes.
Tax administration, as well as anti-VAT fraud have been highly effective in some Member States, and economic and financial cooperation between states is in a significant improvement process.
For example, SAF-T is an international standard of electronic document defined by the OECD that sends tax information to national tax authorities.
This SAF-T is increasingly being adopted among EU Member States. Countries such as Spain, France, Poland, Hungary and the UK have already implemented it and are now planning to integrate digital processes and faster ways of collecting tax information from taxpayers.
If, until now, we were talking about tax returns completed and submitted electronically or SAF-T transmitted to tax authorities, we are now talking about linking tax authorities directly to company servers to retrieve tax information.
Linking tax authorities to company servers makes tax mistakes visible in real time by tax inspectors.
As a rule, companies were given time to correct a possible tax treatment from the date of the transaction until the tax return was completed.
Once connected to the company servers, the tax authorities will take the gross transaction information immediately after it has taken place.
Therefore, any corrections to the wrong tax treatment will be a little more complicated than at present.
As a result, at the level of the companies, the administration of the fiscal function will have a crucial role in shaping the business and the transactions. The tax analysis will be done before you make any business decision and make any transaction.
In conclusion, the technology implemented in the fiscal-taxpayer relationship will lead to the need for a preventive behavior and to manage the tax risk in real time from the taxpayers.
Any tax analysis will be done before any business or transaction occurs, otherwise it is possible to incur additional tax costs and make any corrections more difficult. Potential tax costs must be calculated and possibly included in the cost of a transaction from the outset.
In such a general context, it is likely to really open the discussion on prevention and pro-activity from taxpayers, consultants and ANAF.
